What's Happening to Science Under the Trump Administration?

The One-Sentence Version

The Trump administration has fired over 20,000 scientists and health workers, cancelled billions in research funding, narrowed federal vaccine recommendations, withdrawn from international health organizations, and withdrawn the legal finding that much of federal climate regulation rested on, producing measurable consequences including disease outbreaks, court reversals, and warnings from Nobel laureates, former agency heads, and the Senate. Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version described the finding as the basis of federal climate regulation as a whole. It was the basis for much of that regulation, not all of it.

A note on how this article is sourced. Several widely repeated claims about this record do not survive checking, including some this article previously carried. Where that is true, it is said plainly below rather than quietly dropped, because a reader who catches one bad number in an article stops trusting the good ones.

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By the Numbers

These are government figures, court records, and data from the agencies themselves.

People

What	Number	Source
HHS scientists and health workers fired or forced out	20,500+	[20]
HHS employees laid off in a single day (April 1, 2025)	10,000	[20]
FDA positions cut in that round (announced)	3,500	[20]
CDC positions cut in that round (announced, ~18%)	2,400	[20]
NIH positions cut in that round (announced, ~6%)	1,200	[20]
HHS divisions consolidated	28 into 15	[20]
EPA employees lost (24% of workforce, 40-year staffing low)	4,000+	[17]
NOAA employees fired in one day (Feb 27, 2025)	880	[22]
Fish and Wildlife Service staff fired	1,817	[1]
National Park Service staff cut	2,700	[1]
Forest Service and BLM workers cut	7,000+	[1]
Vaccine advisory committee members fired and replaced	All 17	[5][6]
National Science Board members fired	All 24	[13][14][15]

Money

What	Amount	Source
NIH research grants terminated (Feb. 28 to April 8, 2025)	$1.81 billion (694 grants)	[56]
Total NIH cuts (first 3 months)	$2.7 billion	[12]
mRNA vaccine research cancelled	$500 million (22 studies)	[25]
Moderna pandemic-flu awards withdrawn, including a $590M H5N1 award	$766 million total	[25]
CDC grants to state health departments cancelled	$11.4 billion	[1]
CDC grants to four states, including HIV and STD programs, targeted for cuts (blocked by a court)	~$600 million	[59]
Harvard grants frozen	$2.2 billion	[1]
Proposed FY2027 NIH cut	$5 billion (12%)	[12]
Proposed FY2027 NSF cut	55%	[13][15]
Proposed FY2027 NASA cut	23% (40+ missions eliminated)	[1]
Proposed FY2027 NOAA cut	27%	[22]

Disease

What	Number	Source
Measles cases in 2025 (highest since 1991)	~2,286	[2]
Measles deaths in 2025	3 (two children in Texas, one adult in New Mexico)	[2]
Share of 2025 cases unvaccinated or vaccination status unknown	~93%	[2]
Measles cases in 2026 (as of August 6, no deaths)	2,465	[10]
Whooping cough cases in 2025 (down from ~43,000 in 2024, far above pre-pandemic)	~28,000	[2]
Kindergarten MMR coverage, 2024-25 (herd immunity needs ~95%)	92.5%	[10]

Policy

What	Number	Source
Changes in the January 2026 childhood schedule (stayed by a court in March)	6	[31]
Environmental rollbacks documented by NRDC	420+	[4]
Senate-documented attacks on scientific integrity (first 8 months)	57	[1]
CDC databases that stopped updating by April 2025	46%	[1]
Scientists who report self-censoring due to political pressure	48%	[21]
States suing over the Endangerment Finding revocation	~24, plus 12+ cities and counties	[18]
Court rulings against RFK Jr.’s HHS agenda	2 major losses	[5][24]
Year the U.S. measles elimination review is scheduled (status not yet revoked)	November 2026	[10]
Acres of National Forest opened to logging	59 million	[1]
Americans with PFAS in their drinking water	~100 million	[4]

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What Does the Federal Government Have to Do With Science?

Most people don’t think about federal science agencies until something goes wrong. But the federal government funds roughly 40% of all basic scientific research in the United States. The agencies involved touch nearly every part of daily life:

• The CDC tracks disease outbreaks, recommends vaccines, and publishes the data that state health departments rely on to protect their communities.
• The NIH funds cancer research, Alzheimer’s studies, and clinical trials for new treatments. It’s the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
• The FDA approves the drugs you take, the medical devices your doctor uses, and the safety standards for the food you eat.
• The EPA sets standards for the air you breathe and the water you drink, and regulates chemicals that cause cancer and other diseases.
• NOAA tracks hurricanes, issues tornado warnings, monitors the oceans, and provides the weather data that farmers, pilots, and emergency managers depend on.
• The NSF funds research across every scientific discipline, from physics to computer science to social science.

When these agencies lose staff, funding, or independence, the effects aren’t always visible immediately. Some take months. Some take years. Some are irreversible.

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What Happened: Public Health

RFK Jr. as Health Secretary

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services on a 52-48 vote on February 13, 2025.^[61] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said he was confirmed in January 2025. The Senate confirmed him on February 13, 2025.

Before his confirmation:

• 77 Nobel laureates called him “one of the most dangerous individuals ever considered for a Cabinet position.”^[26]
• 17,000 doctors, nurses, and health professionals signed an open letter calling his nomination “a clear and present danger to the nation’s health.”^[26]
• All nine living former CDC directors warned of “catastrophic and irreversible consequences.”^[26]
• The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Public Health Association, and Infectious Diseases Society of America all opposed the nomination.^[26]

Kennedy has no medical degree and no public health experience. The Center for Countering Digital Hate named him one of the “Disinformation Dozen,” a group responsible for a majority of COVID vaccine misinformation on social media.^[9]

What Kennedy did in office

Through 2025, the childhood schedule was narrowed in stages, not in one stroke. This article previously said Kennedy issued a February 2025 directive removing six vaccines including MMR. That is not what the record shows, and the correction matters more than most, because the claim that MMR was pulled is the link people draw straight to the measles outbreak.

What the Congressional Research Service documents is a sequence of ACIP decisions across 2025: in May, COVID-19 vaccination moved from a universal recommendation to shared clinical decision-making for children, and to “no guidance” for pregnant women. In September, the combined MMRV shot lost its preferred status, with separate MMR and varicella shots recommended instead. In December, hepatitis B moved to individual decision-making for infants born to mothers who tested negative or whose status was unknown.^[31]

Then, on January 5, 2026, following a presidential memorandum, the CDC published a new childhood schedule with six changes. RSV was moved from “all children” to certain high-risk groups. COVID-19 and the infant hepatitis B dose were confirmed as decision-making rather than routine recommendations.^[31]

MMR itself was never removed from the childhood schedule. What changed was the preference for the combined MMRV formulation over separate MMR and varicella shots, which is a question of which needle, not whether to vaccinate against measles. That distinction is worth holding onto through the outbreak section below.

March 25, 2025: David Geier, a researcher who had been disciplined for practicing medicine without a license in Maryland, was hired to lead HHS efforts to find “the cause” of autism.^[8] Geier’s studies linking vaccines to autism had been retracted and widely condemned as methodologically unsound. The administration didn’t just fire real scientists. It replaced them with discredited ones.

March 28, 2025: HHS forced out Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator and director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who was told to resign or be fired. His resignation letter said: “truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” Marks later told the Associated Press that shortly before he was forced out, he refused to give Kennedy’s team the ability to directly edit the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, though he let them read its reports. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database,” he said.^[7][58] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said Marks’s letter accused Kennedy of pressuring him to “edit” the vaccine safety database. The letter contains no such words, and Marks’s account is the reverse: he refused to give Kennedy’s team edit access.

May 2025: Kennedy called fluoride a “dangerous neurotoxin” and the FDA began phasing out fluoride supplements for children.^[8] Utah became the first state to ban fluoride in public drinking water. The CDC had previously named water fluoridation one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century. Since federal fortification began in 1998, neural tube birth defects had dropped 40%.

June 9, 2025: Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the expert panel that has guided U.S. vaccine policy for decades.^[5] It was the first mass firing in the committee’s history. Replacements included people with records of expressing unfounded doubts about vaccine safety. Only 6 of the 13 new appointees had “meaningful experience in vaccines,” according to a federal judge who later reviewed the appointments.^[5][24]

August 2025: Kennedy’s HHS cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine research, pulling funding from 22 studies.^[25] He also cancelled a $590 million Moderna bird flu vaccine contract during an active H5N1 outbreak that had already killed at least one person.^[25] Moderna’s early trials had shown a “rapid, potent, and durable immune response.”

August 27, 2025: Trump fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after she refused Kennedy’s demands to change vaccine policy.^[1] Three senior CDC officials resigned in protest the same day: Dr. Demetre Daskalakis (respiratory illness/immunization), Dr. Deb Houry (chief medical officer), and Dr. Dan Jernigan (infectious disease response).

April 2026: Kennedy told Congress “I’ve never been anti-vaccine.”^[8] His prior public statements include “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” (2023) and “Before you vaccinate that baby, do your independent research” (2021).^[8][9] FactCheck.org, CNN, PBS, and Newsweek all documented the contradiction. When Rep. Lucy McBath challenged him, Kennedy dismissed her objections as “crocodile tears.”^[11]

At the same hearing, Kennedy called Medicaid programs that pay family members to care for elderly or disabled relatives “rife with fraud,” saying they compensate people for tasks they “used to do as family members for free.”^[11] The programs serve 11 million Americans. Sue Root, a Colorado nurse who cares for her daughter with a catastrophic brain injury, ventilator, and feeding tube, called the framing “deeply dismissive of the reality of special needs families like mine.”

The FDA killed a cancer drug, then Kennedy lied about it to Congress

On April 10, 2026, the FDA rejected Replimune’s melanoma drug RP1 for the second time.^[9] The initial FDA advisory panel had voted to approve it. That decision was overturned by Dr. Vinay Prasad, an RFK appointee installed at the top of the FDA’s biologics review division.

In the clinical trial, 1 in 3 patients who had failed standard treatment went into remission with RP1. Dr. Anna Pavlick, a 25-year melanoma researcher and the trial’s lead investigator, said: “I have patients who have been treated with this drug that are still alive today who would otherwise be dead.”^[9]

On April 22, Kennedy defended the rejection before the Senate Finance Committee. He made two claims that were false: he said “every panel within FDA” rejected the drug (the first panel had approved it) and that trial patients also received “a chemotherapy drug” (they received nivolumab, an immunotherapy, not chemotherapy).^[8][9] Replimune’s stock collapsed roughly 70%. Hundreds of layoffs followed. Approximately 8,500 Americans die of advanced melanoma each year.

Samoa, and what Kennedy told the Senate

At his 2025 confirmation hearings, Kennedy was asked about a trip he made to Samoa in 2019, months before a measles outbreak there killed 83 people, most of them children under 5. He told senators the visit had nothing to do with vaccines. Asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, he said, “I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa.” Asked the following day by Sen. Ed Markey, he said, “My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines.”^[34]

Documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Guardian, published August 27, 2026, include a letter Kennedy sent to Samoa’s prime minister on January 20, 2019, before that visit. Written on Children’s Health Defense letterhead, it asks permission to study the country’s use of the MMR vaccine after two children died from improperly prepared doses. It uses the words vaccine or vaccination eight times. “I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines,” Kennedy wrote.^[34] The letter surfaced through a lawsuit against the State Department brought with the aid of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.^[34]

Two qualifications belong with this. Kennedy was not under oath at a confirmation hearing, and knowingly giving materially false testimony to Congress is a crime whether or not a witness is sworn, though it is rarely prosecuted. HHS told the AP that the visit “was unrelated to vaccines” and that any insinuation Kennedy lied is “not only false but outright defamatory.”^[34]

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana physician who chairs the Senate health committee, provided a decisive confirmation vote after receiving commitments on vaccine policy, among them that the ACIP advisory committee would be kept “without changes.”^[34] Kennedy removed all 17 members five months later. Cassidy said in June 2026, “The commitments that were made to me have been violated.”^[34]

The measles outbreak

In 2025 the United States recorded roughly 2,286 confirmed measles cases, the most since 1991, across 45 jurisdictions and 48 outbreaks. Three people died: two unvaccinated children in Texas, neither with an underlying condition, and one adult in New Mexico. About 93 percent of cases were in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown, and about 11 percent of patients were hospitalized. The largest outbreak, in West Texas, passed 760 cases before being declared over in August.^[2]

In 2026 the pace continued. As of August 6, 2026 the country had recorded 2,465 cases, with no deaths confirmed.^[10]

What did not happen: the loss of elimination status

An earlier version of this article said the World Health Organization revoked the United States’ measles elimination status in June 2025. That is wrong, and the source it rested on does not exist. The correction is worth making carefully, because the true version is still bad news, just a different kind.

In November 2025 the Pan American Health Organization’s Regional Verification Commission found that the Region of the Americas had lost its status as free of endemic measles transmission. The country that triggered it was Canada, which met the technical criterion of uninterrupted circulation of the same virus genotype for twelve months or more.^[10]

The United States has not lost its own elimination status. PAHO postponed the country-specific review for the United States and Mexico to November 2026, at the Commission’s regular annual meeting, with the U.S. analysis period running from the January 20, 2025 outbreak onset. That review is still pending. Public health researchers widely expect the United States to lose the designation it earned in 2000, but as of this writing it has not.^[10]

Kindergarten MMR coverage stood at 92.5 percent for the 2024-25 school year, below the roughly 95 percent needed for herd immunity and down from 95.2 percent in 2019-20. That is a meaningful decline. It is not the 81.4 percent this article previously reported.^[10]

Whooping cough, corrected

Pertussis is the other number that has circulated in a misleading form, including here.

Roughly 28,000 whooping cough cases were reported in 2025. That is several times the 2023 total and far above pre-pandemic levels, and it reflects a real erosion in protection. But it is lower than 2024, which saw more than 43,000 cases and which the CDC identifies as the recent peak, in November of that year. This article previously described 2025 as a surge “up from 2,800 in 2024,” which inverted the comparison and made a decline look like a tenfold jump.^[2][41]

The accurate version: pertussis has been running far above its pre-pandemic baseline since 2024, and infants remain at the highest risk of severe disease and death. Kentucky recorded its third infant pertussis death of 2025, in a state that had recorded none since 2018.^[41]

The CDC website changed what it says about vaccines and autism

The CDC’s page on vaccines and autism now states that “vaccines do not cause autism” is “not an evidence-based claim.” The new language says the denial is unproven “because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” and adds that “scientists have not identified the root causes of autism.”^[35]

Read carefully, the page does not assert that vaccines cause autism. It casts doubt on the denial, which is a different move and a subtler one. The distinction matters because of how the underlying science works. Twenty-plus years of studies covering millions of children have found no link. No study can prove a negative with absolute finality, so “studies have not ruled out the possibility” is technically true of almost any hypothesis, including ones with no supporting evidence at all. Applying that standard selectively to one claim is what changes the meaning.

The edit came in two stages, in November 2025 and again around July 22-23, 2026. Reporting tied the July timing to securing votes on the Senate HELP Committee to confirm CDC director nominee Dr. Erica Schwartz. Kennedy said he personally instructed the CDC to change its position. The American Medical Association condemned the change.^[35]

Foodborne illness monitoring was cut, and then an outbreak arrived

In July 2025, the CDC reduced the pathogens that FoodNet, its foodborne-illness surveillance network, is required to track routinely. The number went from eight to two: salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. Dropped from routine surveillance were cyclospora, campylobacter, listeria, shigella, vibrio, and Yersinia.^[36]

A year later, cyclospora arrived. By mid-July 2026 a cyclosporiasis outbreak, which causes severe watery diarrhea, was spreading across at least 17 states, with Michigan reporting hundreds of cases. By late July, researchers put the count near 11,000 with roughly 98 hospitalizations. Reporting on the state count varied widely, from at least nine states to more than 40, which is itself a symptom of degraded surveillance.^[36]

The CDC declared the outbreak over on September 11, 2026. The final count reported at its close was 12,883 people sickened in 21 states, 570 hospitalized and two deaths, the largest cyclospora outbreak on record in the United States. It was linked to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico.^[44]

Staffing had been cut alongside the monitoring. DOGE eliminated 8 of the 11 positions at the CDC’s cyclospora laboratory, leaving three people. Dan Jernigan, a former CDC center director, described the effect without embellishment: “there were fewer people to respond to the cyclospora outbreak when it was first detected.”^[36]

One caution about causation. Surveillance does not prevent an outbreak; it detects and measures one. The documented consequence of cutting it is that this outbreak, which became the largest of its kind on record, spread faster than the agency could track. Whether better surveillance would have contained it is not something the record establishes.

HIV and AIDS funding gutted

In the week of February 9, 2026, HHS told Congress it would end about $600 million in CDC grants in four Democrat-led states: California, Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota. The grants span a range of public health work. According to the states’ lawsuit, one of them is the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, which the complaint calls the “backbone” of public health nationwide, and Healthcare Dive reported that over 20 of the canceled grants are dedicated to HIV prevention or HIV and AIDS surveillance. An HHS spokesperson said, “These grants are being terminated because they do not reflect agency priorities.” The four states’ attorneys general sued, arguing the cuts rest on “arbitrary political animus.” On February 12, U.S. District Judge Manish Shah temporarily blocked the cuts, and in March he issued a preliminary injunction.^[59] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version described the $600 million as HIV and STD prevention grants and quoted the states as calling the cuts “unconstitutional retaliation.” The cuts span a range of CDC grants, including the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, with more than 20 HIV grants among them, and a federal judge has blocked them.

Beyond those grants, the administration eliminated Trump’s own first-term initiative, “Ending the HIV/AIDS Epidemic.”^[1] Over 200 federal HIV/AIDS research grants were terminated. The Ryan White program was cut $239 million. A 15-year AIDS vaccine development project was ended. The CDC’s Maternal and Child Health Branch was shut down entirely, with all 22 staff terminated, ending treatment support for 380,000 HIV-positive pregnant women.

Clinical trial patients abandoned

On February 6, 2025, USAID funding cuts severed patients from the researchers monitoring them in active clinical trials.^[1] Patients receiving experimental drugs and medical devices were abruptly cut off. Studies included malaria treatment for children under 5 and tuberculosis treatment for children and teens. No transition plan was provided.

The courts intervened

On March 16, 2026, a federal judge blocked Kennedy’s vaccine schedule changes, ruling them “arbitrary and capricious.”^[5][6][24] The court invalidated all 13 new ACIP appointments and voided every vote the reconstituted committee had taken since June 2025. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the ruling “historic.”

On April 18, 2026, a federal judge voided Kennedy’s ban on federal funding for pediatric gender-affirming care.^[1] The judge’s opening line: “Unserious leaders are unsafe.” He ruled Kennedy had acted with “wanton disregard” for the law and called an HHS argument in court “a bald-faced lie.” At least 40 health systems had halted care under the federal threat before the ruling.

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What Happened: Research Funding

NIH

Between February 28 and April 8, 2025, the NIH terminated 694 research grants worth $1.81 billion across 24 of its 26 institutes and centers, according to a research letter in JAMA. About 30 percent of that money had not yet been spent when the grants were cut. The National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities had the most grants terminated, 128 and 77, and Columbia University had the most terminations of any recipient, 157.^[56]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the 694 grants were cancelled on a single day, March 15, 2025, and were worth $2.4 billion. It also gave a breakdown by disease area (127 cancer projects, among others) and said researchers described telling terminal cancer patients their studies were ending. The documented figures are $1.81 billion over six weeks; the breakdown and the account of patients could not be traced to any source and have been removed.

Total NIH cuts in the first three months exceeded $2.7 billion.^[12] Cancer research funding fell 31% compared to 2024. The proposed FY2026 budget would cut NIH by 40%. The FY2027 budget proposes a $5 billion cut (12%) and would eliminate three of the NIH’s 27 institutes: the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.

On April 16, 2025, Dr. Kevin Hall, the NIH’s top researcher on ultra-processed foods, resigned after leadership suppressed his findings.^[1] He said the agency made him feel he could no longer “freely conduct unbiased science.”

Congress rejected the deepest proposed cuts and actually increased NIH funding by $415 million, but the grant cancellations and staffing losses had already occurred.

NSF

The FY2027 budget proposes cutting the National Science Foundation by 55%, from $8.7 billion to $4.8 billion.^[13][15] The entire social sciences directorate would be eliminated. On April 25, 2026, Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the apolitical body Congress created in 1950 to oversee the $9 billion agency.^[14][15][23] Former NSB Chair Dan Reed called the action “unprecedented.”^[14] The board can officially be dissolved only by Congress.

NASA

The FY2027 budget proposes cutting NASA by 23%, eliminating 40 or more missions.^[1]

Universities

Across NIH and NSF combined, 7,840 grants were cancelled or suspended.^[12] The administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard, demanding a $1 billion payment.^[1] A federal judge ruled the cuts unlawful. Columbia paid $200 million and Brown paid $50 million in separate settlements. The American Academy of Pediatrics had $12 million in federal grants terminated after opposing Kennedy’s nomination.^[26]

How the grants were selected: a keyword search

For a long time the method behind the cancellations was a matter of inference. In July 2026 it stopped being one. In signed court stipulations filed in Thakur v. Trump, a case brought by research professors in spring 2025, federal agencies admitted they had used keyword searches to select University of California grants for termination. The keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy, and COVID-19.^[37]

More than 1,000 UC research grants were terminated, worth nearly $2 billion by the plaintiffs’ accounting. Their lawyers argue the stipulations establish that the cancellations were unlawful, and have asked the judge to skip trial and rule that the government committed repeated constitutional violations, including of the First Amendment. A hearing was scheduled for October 20, 2026.^[37]

The significance is narrower and sharper than “grants were cut.” A keyword search does not evaluate whether a study is sound, whether its methods hold up, or whether the money was well spent. It matches strings of text. A cancer study that mentioned recruiting a diverse patient population would match; a weak study that used none of the words would not.

A proposed rule would put political appointees in the review

In late May 2026, the Office of Management and Budget proposed a rewrite of the rules governing all federal grantmaking, docketed as OMB-2026-0034 and revising what is known as the Uniform Guidance. Two provisions bear directly on science. Agency heads would designate senior political appointees to conduct a “pre-issuance review” of discretionary awards, which must “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” Agencies could also terminate active grants deemed inconsistent with agency priorities. A third provision would make publication and open-access fees unallowable costs, which affects whether federally funded results can be published where other scientists can read them.^[38]

The comment period closed on July 13, 2026 with 341,699 public comments, far beyond what a rulemaking normally draws. An analysis by Tech Policy Press found 94 percent of the comments it examined opposed the rule, with politicization of grants the leading concern. Brandon Jones, president of the American Geophysical Union, said the rule would “restructure the foundational rules of U.S. science funding… to serve political priorities rather than the public good.” If finalized as proposed, it would take effect October 1, 2026.^[38]

The strongest argument for the rule is worth stating: elected officials do set national priorities, and an administration has a legitimate claim to direct discretionary spending toward its goals. Voters can hold a president accountable for those choices in a way they cannot hold peer reviewers accountable. The objection is not that politics has no role in setting priorities. It is that peer review exists to answer a different question, whether the science is any good, and a political appointee reviewing a grant proposal is not positioned to answer it.

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What Happened: The Workforce

The mass firings

On April 1, 2025, HHS carried out layoffs of about 10,000 employees in a single day, under a restructuring announced March 27. The department’s fact sheet planned cuts of about 3,500 at the FDA, 2,400 at the CDC and 1,200 at the NIH.^[20][57] The CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was eliminated the same week that lead contamination forced the closure of Milwaukee schools, displacing 1,800 students.

The layoffs were part of a plan to shrink the department from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees. By August 2025, ProPublica counted more than 20,500 HHS workers gone, about 18 percent of the department, including 21 percent of FDA staff, 15 percent of the CDC’s and 16 percent of NIH’s.^[57]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version gave per-agency layoff figures (2,473 at the CDC, 2,519 at the FDA and 1,312 at the NIH) and called the drop a 25% reduction. Those numbers appear in none of the sources. The planned cuts are given above, and the documented share of HHS workers gone by August 2025 is about 18 percent.

At the EPA, staffing dropped to 12,849, the lowest level in 40 years.^[17] The agency lost over 4,000 workers, 24% of its workforce. The almost 2,000 staff who left the roster at the end of 2025, largely through voluntary and early retirements, had a median 30.3 years of service, compared with 10.8 years for those who remain.^[17] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version applied the 30.3-year median to all departing staff. It describes the almost 2,000 who left at the end of 2025. The EPA’s entire Office of Research and Development, the agency’s research arm responsible for the science behind air quality standards, water safety rules, and chemical risk assessments, was dissolved on July 18, 2025.

NOAA lost 880 employees on February 27, 2025 alone, 7.3% of its total staff.^[22] The cuts included personnel at the National Hurricane Center and the Storm Prediction Center. Weather balloon launches were immediately curtailed.

The Fish and Wildlife Service lost 1,817 staff members. The National Park Service lost 2,700. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lost 7,000 combined.^[1]

The data went dark

On August 15, 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner was fired immediately after a weak jobs report, the first such firing in the agency’s 140-year history.^[3] Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said it was “way beyond anything Richard Nixon ever did.” In November 2025, the October jobs report was cancelled for the first time in over 75 years, creating a permanent gap in American employment records.^[3]

The Senate documented the pattern

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a report on September 9, 2025, documenting 57 attacks on scientific integrity in just the first eight months.^[1] The report concluded: “The harms from the Trump Administration’s cuts and firings will accumulate for years, indeed for decades, to come: lives that might have been saved by studies the Administration defunded; the loss of scientific innovation as scientists flee to countries where their work is not censored.”

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What Happened: Climate and Environment

The Natural Resources Defense Council has documented over 420 environmental rollbacks since January 2025.^[4]

The Endangerment Finding

On February 12, 2026, the EPA revoked the Endangerment Finding, the 2009 scientific determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health.^[16][19] The finding was the basis for much of the federal government’s climate regulation. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the rescission “the single largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America.”^[62] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version quoted Zeldin as calling it “the largest deregulatory action in American history.” His words are quoted above.

Precision matters on what that did. The 2009 finding was made under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, which governs motor vehicles. Revoking it eliminated the finding and every federal greenhouse gas standard for vehicles and engines from model year 2012 forward. It did not by itself repeal power plant rules, which rest on a different section of the Act, and it did not touch regulation of conventional pollutants such as ozone and nitrogen oxides. What it removes is the legal foundation that federal greenhouse gas regulation has been built on since 2009, which is why reporting described it as opening the way to a broader rollback for stationary sources. That broader effect depends on further rulemaking and on the courts.^[19]

The finding was based on research from NASA, NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and thousands of peer-reviewed studies.^[16] Two challenges are pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit: one filed February 18, 2026 by public health and environmental organizations including the American Public Health Association and the American Lung Association, and one filed March 20 by roughly two dozen states along with more than a dozen cities and counties.^[18]

NOAA

NOAA’s proposed budget cut is 27%, with a 75% cut to its research office budget.^[22] Its climate research arm, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, is targeted for total dissolution, along with 80 university research partnerships. The Mauna Loa Observatory, which has collected continuous atmospheric CO2 data since the 1950s, and the Argo network of 4,000 ocean monitoring buoys are both at risk of defunding. Contracts for next-generation weather satellites were terminated over the objections of NOAA scientists, who said the replacement plan was “a terrible idea harming forecasting.”^[22]

In June 2025, the Pentagon stopped sharing weather data with NOAA staff and civilian scientists, further degrading the observation network.^[1]

On July 4-5, 2025, flash flooding killed over 100 people across six Central Texas counties, the deadliest inland flooding event in nearly 50 years. The Austin/San Antonio NOAA forecasting office had recently lost its Warning Coordination Meteorologist to budget cuts.^[22]

Europe’s leading meteorological center (ECMWF) reported a measurable drop in weather observations delivered by the U.S., degrading international weather models that billions of people depend on.^[22]

Around August 10, 2026, NOAA ended its coordination and support for the Arctic Report Card, the peer-reviewed annual assessment it had produced every year since 2006. The report’s authors learned at a meeting; NOAA said the 2026 edition “will not be facilitated through NOAA.” NOAA communications director Kim Doster said the underlying data “will continue to be collected and will remain publicly available.”^[39]

That distinction is the whole story, and it is worth being precise about. The measurements survive. What ends is the synthesis: the step where scientists assemble scattered data into a reviewed assessment that a policymaker or a reporter can actually read. Zack Labe, a climate scientist who had been an author of the report since 2020, wrote that the decision “is truly devastating,” and told Eos that “the loss of the Arctic Report Card would be significant not only for the scientific community, but also for decision-makers and the public.”^[39] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version called Kim Doster NOAA’s director; she is NOAA’s communications director. It also condensed Labe’s words inside quotation marks; they are now quoted as he said them.

The report itself will go on outside the government. In September the American Geophysical Union announced that it had taken over management of the Arctic Report Card, with the same editorial team, and plans to release the 2026 edition in December.^[63]

Public lands and wildlife

• 59 million acres of National Forest were opened to logging through the proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule, which had protected those lands for over two decades.^[1]
• The Forest Service headquarters was relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah, the state currently suing to seize 18.5 million acres of public land. Nine regional offices were consolidated, and 57 of the agency’s 77 research sites were closed. The chief, Tom Schultz, is a former timber industry executive, named in February 2025.^[1]
• Gray wolves have not been delisted nationwide, though several efforts point that way and this article previously said otherwise. Wolves in the lower 48 outside the Northern Rocky Mountain population remain listed, as threatened in Minnesota and endangered elsewhere; they are already delisted in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and in the eastern thirds of Oregon and Washington. The Fish and Wildlife Service has said it will not develop a national recovery plan, the House passed a delisting bill 211-204, and a September 4, 2026 executive order directs Interior to make a final determination on listing status. None of those has removed the protections yet.^[42]
• Grizzly bears were delisted in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Migratory bird protections were stripped, legally eliminating penalties for industrial bird kills from oil drilling, power lines, and open waste pits.^[4]
• 32 bills were introduced in 2025 to weaken the Endangered Species Act.^[1]
• National Park Service visitor centers were ordered to remove climate change exhibits, environmental impact displays, and Indigenous history panels. At Yellowstone, interpretive panels about climate impacts were taken down.^[1]

Drinking water and chemicals

• The EPA delayed PFAS (“forever chemicals”) drinking water standards by two years and moved to rescind standards for four additional compounds.^[4] Roughly 100 million Americans have PFAS in their drinking water.

• Lead pipe replacement funding, appropriated by Congress, remained undistributed as of late 2025.^[4] An estimated 4 to 12.8 million lead service lines are still in use.

• In September 2026, the EPA announced a screening study of drinking water for pharmaceuticals, PFAS and more than 1,000 other potential contaminants. EPA’s announcement did not mention abortion, but Politico, citing a study description, and the conservative outlet WORLD reported that it will test for the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol, which anti-abortion groups and Republican officials had urged. The study shows whether a substance is present, not how much, and may not lead to regulation. Scientists say there is no evidence that mifepristone in water is harming people or the environment.^[47]

• Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to mandate domestic production of glyphosate, which the World Health Organization classifies as “probably carcinogenic.”^[1] Bayer, the manufacturer, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and proposed a $7.25 billion cancer settlement one day before the order. Kennedy, who once won a $289 million verdict against Monsanto for glyphosate-caused cancer, now defends the order.

Workplace safety

OSHA’s enforcement capacity was gutted through budget cuts and inspector reductions.^[1] At current staffing, it would take 186 years to inspect every American workplace once. A proposed heat stress rule that would have required employers to provide water, shade, and rest breaks was killed. Heat kills at least 40-50 workers per year, disproportionately Latino and immigrant workers. Workplace injury reporting requirements were also rolled back.

Other actions

• The administration withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement on Day One.^[4]
• The National Climate Assessment was cancelled in April 2025.^[1]
• Trump signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to buy electricity from coal-fired power plants.^[1]

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What Happened: Data and Communication

On January 21, 2025, the CDC was ordered to pause all federal health communications.^[1] For the first time in agency history, the CDC failed to issue its weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the primary tool state health departments use to track disease outbreaks.

On January 31, CDC researchers were blocked from publishing in scientific journals and forced to retract already-submitted work to ensure no “forbidden terms” appeared, including “race,” “bias,” and “disparity.”^[1] On February 7, HHS issued a directive requiring all CDC publications and data releases to receive political approval before release.

By April 2025, 46% of CDC databases had stopped updating or been taken offline:^[1]

System taken down or degraded	What it tracked
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report	Disease outbreaks nationwide
WONDER mortality database	Cause-of-death statistics
Vaccines for Children (VFC) tracking	Childhood vaccination rates
STD surveillance	Syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia
HIV monitoring	Infection rates, PrEP access
Tuberculosis surveillance	TB cases and treatment
Hepatitis tracking	Hepatitis A, B, C
Pregnancy Risk Assessment (PRAMS)	Maternal and infant health
National Youth Tobacco Survey	Teen smoking/vaping

In April 2026, the CDC declined to publish a study in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report finding that this season’s COVID vaccine cut healthy adults’ risk of emergency department or urgent care visits by 50% and of COVID hospitalization by 55%.^[9][60] Acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya held the study, citing concerns about its “test-negative” design, a well-established method the CDC has long used for respiratory vaccines. The CDC had published a study of this year’s flu vaccine using the same design a week before the COVID study was set to run. CDC scientists spoke to The Washington Post anonymously, for fear of retaliation. On April 22, HHS said “the manuscript was not accepted for publication.” The study was published instead on June 23, 2026, in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed journal from the American Medical Association.^[60] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the CDC permanently blocked the study and that the flu study was published “without objection.” The CDC declined it for its own journal, citing its design, and it was published in JAMA Network Open in June.

On August 15, 2025, the BLS Commissioner was fired after a weak jobs report, the first such firing in the bureau’s 140-year history.^[3] In November 2025, the October employment report was cancelled for the first time in over 75 years, a permanent gap in the national employment record.^[3] When Federal Reserve researchers published a study showing Americans bear most tariff costs, the administration’s top economic advisor demanded they be “disciplined.”^[1]

A survey of nearly 1,400 ecologists, marine biologists, and conservation scientists found that 48% reported self-censoring their work due to political pressure.^[21]

By August 2026 the scale across the whole federal government was measurable. A tracker maintained by dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers, counted at least 28 federal datasets deleted outright and another 338 modified over roughly 18 months, close to 400 in total, spanning more than 60 agencies and covering the environment, labor, law enforcement and other areas. Health data absorbed the largest share, about 40 percent of the tracked changes.^[30]

A recurring modification is the removal of questions about gender identity from federal surveys, several of them at the CDC, tied to an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The distinction between this and the other changes is worth drawing. A survey that asks a question and reports an unwelcome answer can be argued with. A survey that stops asking produces no answer at all, and the gap cannot be filled retroactively, because the year that was not measured cannot be measured later.^[30]

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What Happened: Pandemic Preparedness

The administration cancelled $11.4 billion in CDC grants to state and local health departments.^[1] It terminated $766 million in pandemic flu vaccine contracts and $500 million in mRNA research.^[25] The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy was dismantled; all six staff departed by June 2025 with no replacements.^[1] USAID’s international outbreak response staff dropped from 50 to 6.

On January 20, 2025, Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, halting all payments and recalling employees.^[1] The U.S. had been the WHO’s largest single donor. The withdrawal occurred while a bird flu outbreak was ongoing and measles cases were rising.

On April 21, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ended the mandatory annual flu vaccine for all military personnel, breaking a 249-year tradition of military vaccination requirements dating to George Washington’s 1777 order to inoculate troops against smallpox.^[1] The decision was made during an active war with over 50,000 troops deployed. In World War I, influenza killed approximately 43,000 American soldiers, nearly half of all U.S. military deaths.

The withdrawal from the WHO also had an operational consequence during an active outbreak. In May 2026, CNN reported that experts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were barred from communicating directly with the WHO about the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. An internal May 18 email set the terms: “We’ll be operating in the same manner for Ebola as we have been doing for Hantavirus, assembling a small group of experts, no more than three.” Those experts were limited to virtual meetings in a “listening capacity,” meaning they could not share U.S. research or respond to data from other countries.^[40]

The United States is the largest historical funder of the WHO and a primary source of viral-genome data, outbreak modeling, and epidemiological expertise. At the time of the reporting, NIAID, the FDA, and the CDC had no permanent directors, and the country had no permanent Surgeon General and no Deputy Health Secretary.^[40]

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The Counter-Arguments

”The government was spending too much on research. These are budget cuts, not attacks on science.”

Federal research funding had grown over the past two decades, and people can reasonably disagree about appropriate levels. But these actions went beyond budget reductions. Firing every member of a vaccine advisory committee and replacing them with skeptics is not a budget decision.^[5] Hiring a researcher disciplined for practicing without a license to study vaccine-autism links is not a budget decision.^[8] Blocking publication of a study showing vaccine effectiveness is not a budget decision.^[9] Revoking the Endangerment Finding is not a budget decision.^[16] Requiring political approval for CDC data releases is not a budget decision.^[1]

“RFK Jr. is trying to improve vaccine safety, not eliminate vaccines”

Kennedy has stated his goal is vaccine safety. The counter-evidence: every major medical organization opposed his confirmation.^[26] The FDA’s top vaccine regulator, forced out in March 2025, wrote in his resignation letter that Kennedy wanted “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”^[58] He hired a discredited researcher whose work was retracted.^[8] A federal judge blocked his vaccine schedule changes as “arbitrary and capricious.”^[5][24] Measles reached its highest level since 1991 and killed three people, two of them unvaccinated children.^[2] He defended the FDA’s rejection of a cancer drug using two false claims about the trial data.^[8][9] He called family caregivers of disabled Americans “rife with fraud.”^[11] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the scientists Kennedy fired said he pressured them to falsify data. No source supports that. Marks’s letter says what is quoted here, and Marks said he refused Kennedy’s team edit access to the vaccine safety database.

In April 2026, Kennedy told Congress he had “never been anti-vaccine.”^[8] His prior statements include: “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” (2023) and “Before you vaccinate that baby, do your independent research” (2021).^[8][9]

“The EPA was overregulating. The Endangerment Finding was government overreach.”

The Endangerment Finding was based on research from NASA, NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists worldwide.^[16] It had survived legal challenges for 17 years. Revoking it doesn’t change the underlying science. It removes the legal foundation the government had been using to act on it.^[19]

The strongest version of the government’s case is a statutory one and deserves to be stated: the EPA argues that Section 202(a) was written for pollution with local and regional effects, that Congress has never passed a law directing the agency to regulate greenhouse gases, and that a question this consequential belongs to elected legislators rather than agency staff. That is a serious argument, and people can hold it in good faith. Whether that authority was being used wisely is a legitimate policy question. Whether greenhouse gases endanger public health is a scientific question with a well-established answer, and the rescission did not include a technical document contesting it.

”These agencies were bloated and needed to be streamlined”

Some agencies may benefit from reorganization. But cutting 24% of the EPA’s workforce,^[17] about 18% of HHS,^[57] and 7.3% of NOAA in a single day,^[22] then dissolving the EPA’s entire research arm, is not streamlining. It’s dismantling institutional capacity that took decades to build and cannot be quickly replaced. The Texas flooding killed over 100 people in a region where the NOAA office had lost key staff.^[22] The measles outbreak accelerated after the disease surveillance systems were taken offline.^[2] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said 25% of HHS. The documented share of HHS workers gone by August 2025 is about 18 percent.

”Federal scientists were too political”

The administration’s own actions undercut this argument. The BLS Commissioner was fired after an unfavorable jobs report.^[3] The October employment report was cancelled, creating a permanent gap in the record.^[3] Federal Reserve researchers were threatened with discipline for publishing a tariff study.^[1] CDC leadership declined to publish a COVID vaccine study over its test-negative design, a method the agency had used in a flu study it published a week earlier; the study later appeared in JAMA Network Open.^[60] An NIH researcher resigned after his findings on ultra-processed foods were suppressed.^[1] When the administration punishes scientists for producing inconvenient results, it is the administration that has made science political. Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the COVID study was blocked because its findings showed vaccines work. The sources do not establish that motive; the CDC cited the study’s design.

---

Where Things Stand Now

The measles outbreak continues. Through early 2026, cases had already exceeded 1,700 and were on pace to surpass the 2025 total.^[2] Kindergarten vaccination rates remain below the 95% threshold in 39 of 50 states.^[10]

Courts have blocked several of the administration’s actions. The vaccine schedule changes were ruled “arbitrary and capricious.”^[5][24] The trans care ban was voided. The inspector general firings were ruled unlawful. Roughly two dozen states, more than a dozen cities and counties, and a coalition of public health organizations are suing over the Endangerment Finding revocation in the D.C. Circuit.^[18] But court rulings take time, and institutional damage from firings, grant cancellations, and data suppression is difficult to reverse.

The National Science Board has been dismissed.^[14][15] NOAA’s climate research arm is slated for elimination.^[22] The Forest Service’s 121-year research infrastructure has been upended.^[1] The CDC’s disease surveillance systems remain degraded.^[1] The EPA’s entire research division no longer exists.^[17] A move to end about $600 million in CDC grants to four states, including HIV programs, is blocked by a preliminary injunction.^[59] A cancer drug that put 1 in 3 patients into remission was rejected by a political appointee, and the Health Secretary lied to Congress about the trial data.^[8][9] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said HIV prevention funding had been gutted. The $600 million in cuts to four states, which include HIV grants, is blocked by a court order.

Congress has pushed back on some budget cuts, adding $415 million to the NIH budget the administration proposed cutting.^[12] But grants that were cancelled, scientists who left, and clinical trials that were terminated cannot be easily restored. Some long-term studies that were decades in the making are permanently lost.

The Senate report documenting 57 attacks on scientific integrity covered only the first eight months.^[1] The pace has accelerated since.

May 7-14, 2026

The EPA’s Risk Management Program query tool, the database Americans used to look up the high-risk chemical facilities near their homes, was published in March 2024 and taken down in May 2025. It covered nearly 12,000 facilities and their safety records. The removal followed requests from the American Chemistry Council and other industry groups, which cited security concerns. RMP information is still legally available, but obtaining it now means visiting one of the federal reading rooms in person, where the public may take notes but not copy or remove materials. Independent groups have since reconstructed searchable versions from public data and FOIA requests.^[27]

On May 11, 2026, the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s silica rule, finalized in 2024 after more than 50 years of regulatory delay and the single strongest federal tool for limiting coal-miner exposure to respirable crystalline silica, was indefinitely delayed. Reporting cited a resurgence of black lung disease among younger miners, including miners in their 30s and 40s, as easily-mined coal seams have been exhausted and miners cut through more silica-bearing rock.^[29]

A previous version of this article included a May 2026 hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship, attributing its late detection to reduced CDC surveillance capacity. That item has been removed. The outbreak involved Andes virus, a South American strain that spreads person to person, aboard a Dutch-flagged ship sailing from Argentina to Antarctica and the South Atlantic. It has no connection to U.S. domestic rodent surveillance, and the CDC in fact responded actively, sending a team to meet the ship in the Canary Islands and quarantining repatriated American passengers in Nebraska. The outbreak reached 13 cases and was declared over in July 2026.

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• The childhood immunization schedule was cut, then stayed. Under a presidential memorandum, a January 5, 2026 change signed by Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill as acting CDC director reduced the routine childhood schedule from covering 18 diseases to 11, moving RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza and COVID-19 to risk-based or shared decision-making rather than removing them outright. A federal court stayed the change on March 16, 2026 in AAP v. Kennedy.^[31]

• Measles. 2025 closed with roughly 2,286 confirmed cases, the most since 1991, with three deaths, two of them children. By around April 10, 2026 there were 1,714 cases, running ahead of the previous year’s pace, and as of August 6, 2026 the total stood at 2,465 with no deaths. National kindergarten MMR coverage was 92.5 percent for the 2024-25 school year, below the roughly 95 percent needed for herd immunity. On elimination status: PAHO stripped the designation from the Region of the Americas in November 2025, driven by Canada’s outbreak, and the United States-specific review was postponed to November 2026 and remains pending.^[32]

• August 26, 2026: Pennsylvania reported two measles-associated deaths, its first in 35 years, and the health secretary suggested they may have been invented. Two unvaccinated Lancaster County residents died, one a newborn. State Health Secretary Debra Bogen said she “sadly can confirm” the deaths.

  There is a real classification dispute here, and it belongs before anything else. Pennsylvania reports deaths where measles is present as “measles-associated,” a category the department says “may not be assessed by the medical examiner or coroner to be the immediate cause of death.” Lancaster County Coroner Stephen Diamantoni determined the newborn died shortly after birth from a laceration of the spleen, with measles antibodies present in postmortem testing. The forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy did not consider the death related to measles, the autopsy showed no enlarged spleen, and the cause of the rupture is still under investigation. Whether these should be counted as measles deaths is genuinely contested.

  Kennedy did not contest the classification. He wrote on X that “the announcement appears to have been premature, and the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” That is an allegation that a named official’s staff invented infant deaths, and he offered no evidence for it. The coroner’s findings complicate how the deaths are categorized; they do not support a claim that anyone made them up. Gov. Josh Shapiro said Kennedy was “spreading misinformation” and urged him to stop.^[33]

  The coroner then ruled, and split the difference. On September 4, 2026, Diamantoni reached opposite conclusions on the two cases. A girl born with Amish lethal microcephaly, a genetic condition that leaves infants with underdeveloped brains and usually kills them within about six months, died of measles at around six weeks old. On the newborn he did not change his finding: the cause was a lacerated spleen, and his forensic pathologist was “quite adamant that it was not measles-related.” So one death is now affirmatively attributed to measles by the county’s own coroner and one is not.^[43]

  Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said the coroner got the six-week-old right: “Even if the child had a condition that would have eventually proved fatal without the measles, she wouldn’t have died when she did if not for the virus.” Offit also drew an inference from the arithmetic. Measles kills roughly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 infected. Two infant deaths at a point when only about 400 infections had been reported implies the real outbreak is much larger than the count. Pennsylvania reported 577 cases as of September 4, every one in a person who had not received both MMR doses.^[43]

  What happened to the federal count is a different kind of problem. On September 3, Reuters reported that Kennedy asked for both deaths to be removed from the CDC’s public measles tracker and that new CDC director Dr. Erica Schwartz approved it. They were replaced with an asterisk. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician who publishes Inside Medicine, then found that the CDC’s internal system, used by state and local health officials, still counted both deaths as confirmed, even though its own documentation says its data “align with the data available on CDC’s external web.”^[43]

  The gap was closed in the direction of the public number. On September 5 someone at the CDC changed the internal site to match. Both now show zero measles deaths for 2026. Faust’s assessment: “It is bad enough that the public was being misled about these deaths. Now, public health professionals with access to the CDC’s internal system are being showed censored information, too.”^[43]

  The change was then made formal. According to a note the CDC published on September 4, as reported by the Guardian, the agency now counts measles deaths from death-certificate data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics rather than from the case reports states send through its notifiable disease system. “CDC will report measles deaths if and when the National Center for Health Statistics reports measles as the underlying cause of death,” an HHS spokesperson said. Debra Houry, a former CDC chief medical officer, called the move “puzzling.” The CDC says it is working with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists “to develop a standardized case definition for deaths due to measles.” On September 12, a 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, died of probable measles, according to the county coroner.^[45]

  On September 15, Pennsylvania announced a fourth measles-associated death, an unvaccinated 18-year-old in Mifflin County who died of a rare neurological complication of the disease. It was the first year with four U.S. measles deaths since 1992. Gov. Josh Shapiro said Kennedy had “personally intervened in an otherwise administrative process to direct the CDC to not report these Pennsylvania deaths.” Kennedy called that false and said the CDC “will report measles-caused deaths when the National Center for Health Statistics reports measles as the underlying cause based on death record information submitted by the states.”^[46]

  On September 16, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the Senate health committee and voted to confirm Kennedy, opened a hearing by saying, “Now we have people dying from measles. That’s going to be a terrible legacy for this administration,” and, “Misinformation and misguided policies are leaving children and adults unprotected against disease that we know how to prevent.” At the same hearing, Trump’s third surgeon general nominee, Dr. Nicole Saphier, said, “I do not believe childhood vaccines cause autism,” and, asked whether the MMR vaccine is “extremely lethal, as the president said,” answered, “I do not believe the MMR vaccine to be lethal. I believe the MMR vaccine is our greatest tool for combating measles.” An HHS spokeswoman said “any notion that the Trump Administration is discouraging measles vaccination is absolutely fake news.”^[48]

• Testifying before the House Education and Workforce Committee on April 17, 2026, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said “I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” a claim contradicted by his own recorded statements, including a July 2023 podcast remark that “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” which he later denied making. Asked about the outbreak he said, “It has nothing to do with me. It has to do [with the fact] that we have a global epidemic.”^[32]

• On September 17, 2026, the health secretary keynoted the anti-vaccine organization he used to run. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke for about an hour and a half to the Washington conference of Children’s Health Defense, which he chaired from 2015 to 2023. “You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” he told the audience. He addressed the country’s measles outbreak once, and by redirecting from it: “We care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines. I’d ask you to care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries.” In the same speech he said, “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft, and those potential impacts on health.” Chemtrails are a long-standing conspiracy theory; what aircraft leave behind are contrails, ice crystals that form when hot engine exhaust meets cold air. Also on the program was Andrew Wakefield, whose medical license was revoked after he was found to have fabricated research linking vaccines to autism.^[49]

• Pennsylvania made its request for federal help conditional (September 16, 2026). The state’s health secretary wrote to the CDC director beginning the process of requesting emergency epidemiological assistance for its measles outbreak, while saying the state would withdraw the request if the agency would not publish the four measles-associated deaths Pennsylvania has reported. “The CDC’s choice not to publicly recognize the deaths undermines our response,” she wrote. The CDC replied that it “will not submit to political blackmail that conditions critical public health assistance.” As of September 16 the state reported 731 cases and four deaths. The classification dispute is genuine: the CDC’s dashboard says available information “does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the deaths.” A former director of the CDC’s immunization center said that relitigating death-certificate decisions is “highly atypical.”^[50]

• The panel that decides which preventive care is free was refilled (September 17, 2026). The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is a 16-member body most people have never heard of, and its ratings carry legal weight: when it gives a service an A or a B, insurers must cover it at no cost to the patient. Kennedy left it idle for over a year, canceled meetings and fired its two top leaders in May, then named eight new members. Five of the eight are specialists rather than primary-care doctors, a reversal of a practice meant to keep specialty interests from shaping what the country pays for, and one appointee holds no medical degree. The department’s own announcement credits that appointee with “four years of experience,” where the others are credited with 14 to 48. The panel’s conflict-of-interest disclosure policy has been removed from its website, which says it is being updated. Kennedy says he is strengthening the panel so it “asks hard questions, follows the evidence wherever it leads.” Appointing members is within his authority; what is contested is the composition, the vetting nobody can see, and the missing policy.^[51]

• A group tied to Kennedy sold companies access to officials (September 18, 2026). Bloomberg News reported a sponsorship menu with a top tier quoted at $300,000 that included a private dinner with Kennedy and the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Several listed sponsors are regulated by agencies he runs. The department says the officials did not know about the arrangements. No law is alleged to have been broken.^[52]

• An order is being drafted that would change who decides which medical research gets funded (September 18-20, 2026). Normally NIH grants are chosen through review by outside scientists. After an Oval Office meeting on September 18, Politico reported, citing two administration officials, that Trump told budget director Russ Vought to draft an executive order creating a board to decide which grants NIH funds. The board would include Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and would need unanimous votes. The Washington Post and The New York Times each reported the meeting and the drafting from their own sources. All of those sources are unnamed, nothing has been signed, and one detail, that Trump asked Bhattacharya to cut Harvard’s funding and was refused, comes from Politico alone. Congress had already blocked an earlier version of this idea until December 11. NIH’s statement: “There will be no rescissions to NIH grant monies. All NIH grant monies will be spent.”^[53]

• Records show the EPA asked a pesticide maker which restrictions it preferred (released September 10, 2026). Dicamba is a weedkiller that drifts onto neighboring farms, and federal courts threw out its approvals in 2020 and 2024. Records released in the lawsuit over its latest approval show that in May 2025 the EPA gave Bayer a presentation of possible restrictions ending with the question, “Which mitigation option to go forward with?” Bayer chose the less restrictive option on temperature, and its choices were kept in the approval the EPA issued in February 2026; one further request was dropped. Read this one with both sides in view. The New Lede, which first reported the records, wrote that it “is not uncommon for the EPA to work with pesticide companies while developing regulations,” and that “the documents don’t prove that Bayer’s choices drove the final rulemaking.” The EPA says, “the registrant does not dictate terms.”^[54]

• Black lung is at its highest rate in nearly fifty years among long-serving Appalachian miners (study published August 5, 2026). Government researchers found the disease in 32.5% of working underground miners in central Appalachia with 25 or more years on the job, up from 20.6% in 2018. The stronger limit on silica dust finalized in 2024 is still not being enforced: courts paused it in response to industry lawsuits, and according to the Kentucky Lantern the administration “did not oppose the delay.” The mine-safety agency says it “continues to vigorously enforce” the older, weaker limit. The industry makes a fair point about cause: disease showing up now reflects dust breathed years ago, so the increase itself cannot be attributed to current policy.^[55]

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Sources

1. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Minority Staff (Sen. Blumenthal): Trump Administration Attacks on Scientific Integrity (September 9, 2025). An earlier version linked to a press release page that no longer loads; this is the report itself.

2. CDC: Measles Cases and Outbreaks and CBS News: Map shows more than 2,200 measles cases across U.S. in 2025 outbreaks and CDC: Pertussis Surveillance and Trends

3. BLS: Employment Data

4. EPA: Climate Change

5. NPR: Federal Judge Blocks RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Changes (March 2026)

6. NBC News: Federal Judge Blocks Changes to Childhood Vaccine Schedule

7. Washington Post: Dr. Peter Marks Resignation (March 2025)

8. PolitiFact: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spars with Senate committee over COVID-19 vaccines, CDC (September 4, 2025) and its PBS NewsHour version and Al Jazeera: Fact checking Robert F. Kennedy’s statements to Senate on COVID, vaccines. This source covers the September 2025 testimony on COVID-19 vaccines and the CDC. An earlier version of this article dated it to April 2026 and cited it for claims it does not address; those claims are carried by sources 9, 11 and 32.

9. CIDRAP: RFK Jr.’s Congressional Testimony Showcases Ideology Over Science

10. PAHO: Update on the review of measles elimination status (March 2, 2026) and CIDRAP (University of Minnesota): US measles total surpasses 1,700 cases and CDC SchoolVaxView: kindergarten vaccination coverage data. A previous version of this article cited a WHO page reporting that the United States lost measles elimination status in June 2025. No such page exists and no such determination was made; see the correction above.

11. NPR: Senators Grill RFK Jr. on Vaccines (April 2026)

12. Science/AAAS: NIH Grant Cancellations

13. Scientific American: Entire NSF Science Advisory Board Fired

14. Nature: National Science Board Fired (April 2026)

15. Science/AAAS: Trump Fires NSF’s Oversight Board

16. CBS News: Trump’s EPA Revokes the Endangerment Finding (February 2026)

17. Inside Climate News: EPA Hits 40-Year Lows in Staffing (March 2026)

18. Earthjustice: Endangerment Finding Lawsuit

19. CNBC: EPA Endangerment Finding Repeal Impact

20. STAT News: RFK Jr.’s HHS layoffs begin; thousands of FDA, CDC workers axed (April 1, 2025) and NPR: Layoffs begin at HHS, affecting thousands of staff and leadership and Chemical & Engineering News: US Department of Health and Human Services to lay off 10,000 employees

21. The Wildlife Society: Scientist Survey on Self-Censorship (2025)

22. Washington Post: NOAA Firings and Weather Forecasting

23. The Hill: National Science Board Members Terminated

24. CNBC: Judge Blocks RFK Jr.’s Efforts to Reshape Childhood Vaccine Policy

25. Contract Pharma: HHS Cancels Moderna’s $590M mRNA Avian Flu Vaccine Award and Fierce Biotech: HHS axes Moderna’s $590M pandemic bird flu vaccine contract, ending funding for late-phase trials. HHS communications director Andrew Nixon said the department “concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable,” adding that “mRNA technology remains under-tested.”

26. NBC News: More than 15,000 doctors sign letter urging Senate to reject RFK Jr. as health secretary and The Hill: More than 75 Nobel laureates urge Senate to reject RFK Jr. and CBS News: Former CDC directors slam RFK Jr. in op-ed and, for the criticism of that Nobel letter, Fox News: Nobel laureate letter opposing RFK Jr. confirmation loaded with Dem donors, officials

27. Environmental Health News: EPA removes public access to chemical plant hazard data amid industry pressure and EPA: Federal Reading Rooms for Risk Management Plans and The Data Liberation Project: EPA Risk Management Program Database

28. CDC: 2026 Multi-country Hantavirus Cluster Linked to Cruise Ship (HAN Health Advisory 00528) and WHO: Hantavirus cluster linked to cruise ship travel, multi-country (Disease Outbreak News) and ECDC: Andes hantavirus outbreak in cruise ship. Cited here for the correction above, not for a claim about U.S. surveillance capacity.

29. Kentucky Lantern: Federal regulators indefinitely delay rule to protect coal miners from black lung (April 9, 2026) and KFF Health News: Black lung, coal miners, silica dust and the federal rule rollback

30. Global Biodefense: Federal Health Data Takes Biggest Hit as Trump Administration Purges Nearly 400 Government Datasets (August 18, 2026) and DataIndex.us: tracker monitoring federal dataset availability, terminations and changes

31. Congressional Research Service: Changes to CDC Vaccine Recommendations in 2025 and 2026 (IN12684)

32. CIDRAP (University of Minnesota): US measles total surpasses 1,700 cases and AAP News: 2025 measles cases highest since 1991, final CDC tally and PAHO: Update on the review of measles elimination status (March 2, 2026) and FactCheck.org: SciCheck — RFK Jr. Incorrectly Denies Past Remarks on Vaccine Safety and Effectiveness and CDC SchoolVaxView: kindergarten vaccination coverage data

33. Philadelphia Inquirer: A newborn baby was one of Pa.’s two measles-related deaths, state says, as RFK questions whether they were ‘fabricated’ (August 26, 2026) and NOTUS: Josh Shapiro and RFK Jr. Trade Barbs Over Deadly Measles Outbreak and The Epoch Times: RFK Jr. Says Pennsylvania Officials May Have Fabricated Measles Deaths

34. CNN (Associated Press): RFK Jr. said a Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. New documents refute that (August 27, 2026) and The Washington Times (AP): RFK Jr. said a Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. New documents refute that (August 27, 2026) and STAT News: RFK Jr. said a Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. New documents refute that (August 27, 2026)

35. CBS News: CDC website changes language on vaccines and autism and CNN: CDC nominee and the Senate HELP Committee (July 23, 2026)

36. Newsweek: CDC FoodNet monitoring cut as cyclospora parasite spreads and U.S. News: The cyclosporiasis outbreak is spreading faster than the CDC can track (July 13, 2026) and New Republic: DOGE Gutted the Office That Responds to This Parasite

37. Associated Press: California research grants terminated by keyword search, lawsuit filings show (July 2026) and CalMatters: Research grants and California (July 2026)

38. Eos: Proposed OMB Rule Change Attracts 340,000+ Public Comments and American Physical Society: OMB proposed rule for federal financial assistance and AAMC: OMB Proposed Rule to Revise the Uniform Guidance

39. Eos: Government pulls funding for the Arctic Report Card and Common Dreams: NOAA ends Arctic Report Card coordination

40. CNN: Trump administration bars key US researchers from global virus response talks (May 25, 2026) and U.S. News: Trump admin bars key U.S. researchers from global virus response talk (May 26, 2026)

41. News-Medical: Whooping cough cases rise sharply across the United States (December 18, 2025) and CDC: Pertussis Surveillance and Trends

43. CNN: 6-week-old infant died of measles, Pennsylvania county coroner says (September 4, 2026) and CIDRAP: Lancaster County coroner confirms that second measles death also involves a child and Al Jazeera: US health authorities dispute Pennsylvania’s measles-related deaths (September 1, 2026) and Inside Medicine (Jeremy Faust, MD): CDC’s internal system still counts two Pennsylvania measles deaths and Inside Medicine: CDC removes two measles deaths from internal count

44. CDC: Cyclospora Outbreak Linked to Iceberg Lettuce (final update, September 11, 2026) and Medical Daily: Iceberg Lettuce Cyclospora Outbreak Ends as the Largest on US Record with 12,883 Illnesses and Two Deaths

45. The Guardian: Trump administration changes how it counts measles deaths amid Pennsylvania outbreak (September 14, 2026) and CDC: Measles Cases and Outbreaks

42. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Gray Wolf Recovery News and Updates and Rep. Tom Tiffany: U.S. House Passes Bill to Delist the Gray Wolf and Pacific Legal Foundation: Trump orders Department of the Interior to finalize gray wolf’s listing status

46. NBC News: Pennsylvania teen dies from measles complications, the state’s fourth death (September 15, 2026) and CNN: Pennsylvania measles deaths (September 15, 2026)

47. EPA: EPA Launches Cutting-Edge Scientific Study to Strengthen Nation’s Understanding of Potential Contaminants in Drinking Water (September 9, 2026), WORLD: EPA to track abortion drugs in America’s drinking water (September 2026) and E&E News: Anti-abortion campaign takes aim at EPA water testing rules (December 2025)

48. The Washington Post (via The Spokesman-Review): Sen. Cassidy says measles surge will be administration’s ‘terrible legacy’ (September 16, 2026) and Scientific American: Trump’s surgeon general nominee Nicole Saphier praises MMR and hepatitis B vaccines in Senate hearing (September 16, 2026)

49. The Guardian: RFK Jr promises anti-vaxxers a ‘friend at the White House’ amid deadly measles outbreak (September 17, 2026) and Mediaite: RFK Jr. Ripped by Critics After Claiming He’s Investigating Chemtrails (September 17, 2026)

50. The Philadelphia Inquirer: Pa. is asking CDC for more emergency aid, but only if measles deaths are reported (September 17, 2026) and Al Jazeera: Pennsylvania seeks CDC help amid dispute over US measles deaths (September 17, 2026)

51. HHS: Secretary Kennedy Announces New U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Members (September 17, 2026), Ars Technica: RFK Jr. stacks another influential federal panel with questionable picks (September 2026) and The Hill: Kennedy overhauls preventive care panel (September 2026)

52. Bloomberg News: RFK Jr.-Linked Group Offered Access to US Officials for Payment (September 18, 2026) and InsideHealthPolicy: MAHA Summit Will Include HHS Leaders, Insurers, Telehealth, AI Companies (September 16, 2026)

53. Politico: Trump asked budget chief to draft order bringing health research funding under his control (September 19, 2026), The Washington Post: White House budget chief pushes for scrutiny of NIH grants in Oval Office clash (September 18, 2026) and The New York Times via The Philadelphia Inquirer: White House moves to take control of NIH scientific grants (September 20, 2026)

54. The New Lede: EPA coordinated with Bayer on reapproval for controversial herbicide dicamba (September 10, 2026), The Guardian: US environment agency let Bayer pick regulations for destructive weedkiller, documents show (September 20, 2026) and EPA: EPA Implements Strongest Protections in Agency History for Over-the-Top Dicamba Use (February 6, 2026)

55. Kentucky Lantern: Appalachia’s black lung rates highest in nearly 50 years as miners’ protections stall (August 5, 2026) and The Guardian: US coalminers plead for benefits as black-lung disease cases surge (September 20, 2026)

56. AJMC: NIH Grants Terminated Amid Trump Administration, Raising Concerns for US Research, Minority Health Disparities (May 8, 2025) and Inside Higher Ed: Minority Health Grants Biggest Target of NIH Cuts (May 13, 2025) and Science: NIH Investigators Left in the Dark After Grant Cancellations (March 18, 2025)

57. HHS: Fact Sheet: HHS’ Transformation to Make America Healthy Again and ProPublica: Gutted: How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies (August 21, 2025)

58. Wikisource: Resignation Letter of Peter Marks (March 28, 2025) and AP (via Inc.): Ex-FDA official tried to block RFK Jr. from vaccine safety data and The Hill: Former top vaccine regulator says he blocked RFK Jr. team from database and CIDRAP: Ouster of top FDA vaccine official prompts concern from lawmakers, scientists

59. Healthcare Dive: CDC moves to cut $600M in grants to Democrat-led states (February 11, 2026) and CalMatters: California sues as Trump cuts $600M in public health grants to four states (February 2026) and Courthouse News Service: Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump’s $600M cuts to public health grants (February 13, 2026) and Chicago Sun-Times: Federal judge extends order blocking Trump cuts to Illinois public health funding (March 16, 2026)

60. Ars Technica: CDC study shows COVID shot benefits; Trump official blocks release (April 9, 2026) and CIDRAP: CDC blocks publication of report showing COVID vaccine efficacy (April 22, 2026) and NBC News: Covid vaccine study the acting CDC director blocked is published in an outside journal (June 23, 2026)

61. Associated Press: Democrats press RFK Jr. on an ethics agreement change involving law firm fees (September 25, 2026)

62. NPR: Trump’s EPA will end the basis for federal climate actions (February 11, 2026)

63. Alaska Beacon: Arctic climate report set for publication despite loss of federal support (September 15, 2026)